Smithfield Foods, the nation’s largest pork producer, closed its Sioux Falls, SD, slaughterhouse after many Smithfield employees grew sick. Tyson Foods closed its Columbus Junction, IA pork slaughterhouse in April, according to the Wall Street Journal.
While many U.S. slaughterhouses are closing, pork slaughterhouses and pork producers are bracing for another coronavirus challenge: a virus called Severe Acute Diarrhea …
Is a new coronavirus already here?
My patient was a young man who wanted to be placed back on buprenorphine. He had started using again. He often missed appointments, did not pick up phone calls. So when I saw him in the room, I masked my surprise. “What makes you want to start today?” I asked. “I live with my grandma,” he said. He could not keep leaving the house for heroin.
Of the many …
With COVID-19, we have a unique opportunity and need to deregulate buprenorphine prescriptions
Drinking the Kool-Aid
Across the USA recently, demonstrators wielding, “Stop the madness! It is just a cold virus!” and “Let me work” signs, chanting “Freedom now” and “Fire Fauci,” dangerously demanded an end to social distancing and stay-at-home orders.
In Italy, we would assume such demonstrations were fomented by the Mafia. In America, the provocateurs are right-wing extremists, Read more…
Don’t drink the COVID conspiracy Kool-Aid
Elise loves this book. The protagonist is a girl who, due to a desire to fit in with her friends, denies her love of lima beans. Camilla awakens with stripes on her skin, and no one can explain it. The doctors are called in, then the specialists. The scientists and experts come next, but all are stumped. …
COVID: an impending case of the stripes
“Would an STI cause abdominal pain?” someone in a class discussion asked.
“Well, when I had chlamydia, I didn’t have abdominal pain,” I responded truthfully.
Instantly, the group went silent.
“OK, Jay. That’s … TMI,” someone else in the group quickly retorted with an uncomfortable half-smile.
I shuddered.
Immediately, I felt pressured to usher in some sort of anodyne remark to help dissipate the uneasy cloud that I could feel billowing out around us.
“Haha, I’m …
We all love a good conspiracy theory. Did a man really walk on the moon? Who really killed JFK? On and on. The medical conspiracy theories have also been around. The anti-vaccine movement has left many children vulnerable to preventable life-threatening diseases. The COVID-19 pandemic has elevated conspiracy theorists to the point that they have planted the seeds of doubt in one too many Americans. Social media has been inundated …
Fact vs. fiction: the battle between life and death in the world of COVID-19
Life may never be the same after COVID-19. With tens of thousands of Americans having succumbed to the coronavirus in the United States, some of us are considering our own mortality. Life insurance companies have plenty of new customers. Estate planning attorneys are busier than ever. Many of us are thinking about how our loved ones will be taken care of in the event of our own death.
Death is always …
We need to learn to accept death in the United States
Like many physicians not initially on the front line of the COVID-19 pandemic, I watched with growing dread as stories from doctors and nurses started coming out from hot spots first in China then in Italy and then Seattle and New York. Seeing their faces and hearing their voices, I was struck by their exhaustion and fear but also by their sense of responsibility and duty. I wanted to help, …
Bearing witness: the physician’s role in a time of crisis
One afternoon in clinic, I opened a patient’s chart for a telehealth visit. Within days of the COVID pandemic, all clinic visits had transitioned to telehealth. The young woman had sent a picture through the electronic medical record of a rash on her leg. Upon calling her, the woman explained that the rash started a month ago, wasn’t painful, and she couldn’t recall anything that caused it. On further investigation …
A response to unemployment during the COVID pandemic: Medicare for all
My three-year-old daughter calls it “canolavirus.” To her, it represents the answer to a number of hitherto unprecedented events happening in her life at this time. Her physician mommy working from home for a number of weeks now. The last she remembers mommy being home continuously for such a long stretch of time was never. I went back to work after my maternity leave when my daughter was …
The unexpected time the COVID-19 pandemic gives physicians
One of the great responsibilities in doctoring is alleviating suffering. That hasn’t changed. But the novelty of COVID-19 makes us uncertain as we care for our patients. Anxious even. We feel helpless watching people get ravaged with SARS-CoV-2. We are all limited in our fund of knowledge. We know that we aren’t incompetent, but COVID-19 has made us feel impotent.
A hospitalist friend recently broke down in tears after pronouncing …
Humility drives physicians in the face of COVID-19
If you’re like me and you don’t live in a state that has already started re-opening, you are likely taking a lot of walks. Regardless of where you are in the U.S., I think we can all agree that if you cough or sneeze in any public setting, you automatically feel like you may as well have a scarlet “S” hung around your neck. I have found myself looking around …
We are not past the risk of COVID-19
She reached for my hand, her hands gnarled, the skin fragile, translucent, road mapped by bluish veins: Hands that had done much in her 87 years. She looked at me from her hospital bed and with voice trembling, her eyes tearing, spoke words that penetrated my heart: “Can I stay here? Everyone is so kind. I am all alone now. I have no family or friends left. I have no …
Loneliness is a silent epidemic crying out to be heard
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The necessity of putting on our own oxygen mask first has never been more clear.
Bringing wellness into the mainstream culture of medicine and empowering and healing the healers so they can heal others has been the focus of my leadership work my entire career in medicine.
It took a pandemic to bring widespread national focus to this issue. The cultural shift is finally beginning. For the sustainability of the practice of …
Self-care is not selfish: It’s imperative to save the practice of medicine
I am a 41-year old physician in the Phoenix metropolitan area. In the course of several unforgettable weeks in March 2020, my life, like every American’s, had been drastically flipped on its head. While I feel fortunate to be able to continue to have employment and a source of income, I cannot deny there is a daily palpable sense that my profession puts me at a great risk for exposure …
Finding hope in the COVID-19 pandemic
“I early conceived a liking for, and sought every opportunity to be in, a position to relieve the suffering of others.”
— Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler
In a time of crisis, epidemic or pandemic, “Who ya gonna call?”: An athlete? A booty-shaking singer? Television or movie stars? Yes, entertainers’ work provide humans fun. They make us laugh, or can foster team pride. But are they heroes? Do they save lives?
Might you call …
Physicians are called to care and service, pandemic or not
“Hey, doc,” our new patient grinned at me without teeth. He wears his teeth to eat peanuts, he explained, but today was hankering for a ham sandwich, so left the teeth at home. Here in the clinic straight from the logging job that he had worked for the past fifty years, he wore steel-toed boots, hands covered in dirt. Clarifying that I was a medical student, I asked …
When learning medicine is not enough
We worked tirelessly attempting to resuscitate this mother of five for almost an hour. Her husband was called, and he notified us that he would be there shortly. In the end, our heroic measures were simply not enough. It is fearful to imagine being told your wife and mother to your five children is no longer alive on Mother’s Day. The uncertainty of what killed her is a tough pill …
A young doctor struggles against the emotional devastation of losing a patient
The last couple of months in a world with COVID-19 have felt absurd, incomprehensible, like something out of a movie. Most of us hunker down in our homes and wear masks whenever we’re out. Those who work in patient care settings try to limit risk, both of becoming infected, or perhaps worse, unknowingly infecting others. How can this really be happening? Everything seems to have changed overnight. The paranoia, fear, …
Alfred Hitchcock, COVID-19, and the MacGuffin
Sunlight creeps through the living room blinds. We have taken to sleeping here now on the giant sectional sofa. Most days, there is no reason to set an alarm. The dog stirs, moves from where he was nestled against one child to stretch out alongside another.
My son rolls over, clutching the impulsively purchased Sunday Citizen throw around his bony frame. He is wearing his quarantine uniform – buffalo plaid flannel …
Family and medicine: a day in the life during the pandemic
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